


Once Upon a Time, Tomorrow

by navaan



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Character Study, Community: wintercompanion, Fluff and Angst, Hurt/Comfort, Immortality, M/M, Pre-Slash, Romance, Timey-Wimey
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-02
Updated: 2013-07-02
Packaged: 2017-12-16 21:47:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,542
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/866958
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/navaan/pseuds/navaan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jack was left behind without ever knowing why and finds himself suddenly immortal and at a loss of what to do. To his luck the <i>Bad Wolf</i> is looking out for him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Once Upon a Time, Tomorrow

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the [](http://wintercompanion.livejournal.com/profile)[**wintercompanion**](http://wintercompanion.livejournal.com/) challenge _Loyalty and Betrayal_ and initially posted [here](http://wintercompanion.livejournal.com/209168.html).

He swore to himself again that he would find out why he had been left behind on a station full of dead bodies. But even more important: He _needed_ to understand what had happened to him. He needed to know why he couldn't die. He needed to find out if whatever had happened to him was permanent.

Being killed by a Dalek _was_ supposed to be a very permanent death, wasn't it? He'd never heard of it having the drastically opposite effect. There was a reason for the fact that at one time the Daleks would be known as bringers of death across the Galactic Empire – and most definitely not as bringers of incidental immortality.

Something else must have happened. But there was only one person he could think of who might have the answer. So now he only had to go and find the Doctor. Because only the Doctor would know how to help him.

Although he wasn’t at all sure how he would do that exactly – now that he was stuck in the 19th century on planet Earth of all places and without a working vortex manipulator too. Then again he was thinking about _the Doctor_. It was likely that the man would come and find Jack. Surely he would.

 _He didn't come back for you on the game station._ A bitter thought. _They must have thought I was dead. They wouldn't have left me otherwise._ They wouldn't have. Never. Not the Doctor and Rose. He didn't allow himself to believe it. And, of course, he _had_ been dead. He _remembered_ as much.

So once more he tried to quench the niggling doubt and just make a plan for his immediate future.

He took a mouthful of his drink, the alcohol a pleasant burn in his throat. It wasn't enough to take his mind of his own little tragedy though.

He'd been left behind, forgotten. Just days ago he had been shot - a lethal gun shot that should have killed him instantly and _permanently_ . The bullet had managed to kill him, but for some reason he had come back to life once again, healed and whole once more. And here he was sitting in a bar, contemplating the cruelty of his fate even if for all he knew he should be happy to be alive and not contemplating why he wasn't dead.

So, what had happened to him?

“The Doctor. He will be able to fix me,” he muttered. _The Doctor._ The only being who would even have any idea about what could possibly have happened to him. He had to hold on to this thought, this hope with the conviction of a desperate man, because any other path would lead down into madness.

The Doctor would help.

But Jack had no idea where to look for him. Where to start? How to find the _right_ Doctor? A Doctor, who knew him and had been at the game station. A Doctor who had any idea what had turned him into – well, whatever he was now. It was always trouble to go looking for another person travelling in time, at least if you had no way of checking your timelines actually matched up.

His hands started shaking with anger and before he could control himself the glass in his hand was crushed, drink sloshing across his hands, glass digging into his flesh. He stared at it, not quite understanding what had just happened.

“For God's sake!” the man behind the bar shouted. For a moment he seemed angry, but when he came closer and Jack gave him a small apologetic smile, he seemed to calm down instantly.

“Sorry,” Jack said. “I'm not sure how that happened.”

“Should learn to control your strength,” he was admonished, but didn't care, instead watching in fascination while the man helped him pull the shards out of his injured hand and to wrap it in a crude piece of cloth.

Jack stared at his blood on the fabric and already started planning how to hide the healing from this stranger. He didn't need any more trouble right now. “Thank you,” he muttered.

“No problem.”

“I'll pay for the glass, of course,” he said, although he didn’t have much money to spare. Not at the moment. But he'd think of something. He always did. Eventually.

When he pulled out the notes to pay, he had to do a double take. For a moment the writing on them read _Bad Wolf_. He shook his head to clear it. The writing was gone.

But he remembered the word that had followed them around the universe.

If the _Bad Wolf_ was still following him, maybe the Doctor wouldn't be as far away as he'd thought.

For a moment he allowed himself to hope.

* * *

A few days later he was walking down the street, muttering: “I should really give up on this. He'll never come back for me. I'll never see him again. What's the point...?” It was time to face the facts. He was in the wrong place, the wrong time and the Doctor and Rose could be anywhere. Depression was taking hold, but as Jack had found out, drinking yourself to death didn't help either. Not when you woke up again a few minutes later anyway.

“They won't come back.” He sighed. Saying it out loud didn't make it hurt any less, but it helped him to clear his head. Suddenly he stopped and stared right at a poster in front of him. Well not _a_ poster. The whole wall had literally been plastered with similar posters, all reading: “He will come back!”

Then as it had happened before, the writing was gone and he was left behind with a strange feeling that he shouldn't trust strange writings on a wall.

“When the Doctor turns up, it’ll all be put right,” he muttered to himself and shook his head. “He'll fix me and then we'll figure out what this all means...”

* * *

For a while he went on wallowing in misery, feeling sorry for himself and afraid to face his own immortality, afraid to face the the fact that he might never get answers to his questions. And _never_ could turn out to be a very long time.

Torchwood noticed him. Noticing anomalies was their line of work. And Jack figured that maybe staying with them, staying in Cardiff was exactly the right thing to do, to finally get closer to the Doctor – and an answer. And when Torchwood slowly turned into something Jack thought was dangerous he tried to keep things from getting worse as best as he could, at least at his own end. He had no influence on the the things that happened outside of Tochwood-3.

The writing didn't appear again. And although he still wasn't sure what had been going on in the first place, he never stopped waiting for the Doctor to reappear.

One day the Doctor would find him or _he_ would find the Doctor.

He never stopped believing.

Because he knew the Doctor. And if there was anyone he could place his trust in it was him.

So he lived his life, went on living and living and living, waiting and waiting and waiting, trying to be the person the Doctor would have wanted him to be.

 _That_ was a hard task all on its own.

* * *

To hear he really had been abandoned, deliberately left behind, was a blow. To find out that even the Doctor couldn't change what he was now was disappointing.

But the worst was that the Doctor had known about all of it and just chosen to forget about him. The thought hurt more than should be possible, after so many lifetimes filled with happiness and pain.

Jack had trouble swallowing the feeling of betrayal. He'd had so many years to imagine how his reunion with the Doctor would go like – and this was not even close. But even now running with him, facing the dangers of the universe and tumbling head first into another incredible adventure, was actually fun.

“You're different,” Jack told him in a quiet moment, and he didn't only mean the new cheeky look and body.

The Doctor, brown eyes, messy hair, long brown coat and pinstriped suit, frowned at him and then said: “You too.”

“Some experiences change you.”

“Experiences,” the Doctor echoed and scratched at his chin, already focusing back on the problem at hand: Starting a rocket to possibly save the last survivors from the final end of this universe.

“I waited for you,” Jack said.

“I know.”

It was hard to say if this meant that the Doctor had know and just hadn't cared or that he knew that now, because he met Jack again and had not thought about it before. Jack didn't want to ponder the implications.

It didn't even matter, because he was still in love. And how couldn't he be? Even if it seemed more hopeless than ever.

* * *

“I'm sorry I was a coward,” the Doctor – a Doctor, younger, older, different – told him over a glass of Pelgaronian wine. “I was too much of a coward back then to face my mistake.”

For Jack said mistake was a thing of the past now, something that had happened a long time ago. He remembered it, the pain, the feelings of betrayal, but it didn't hurt any more. Not in the same way. The wound had healed – and he'd learned that sometimes you made mistakes on an epic scale that were hard to face. He'd made mistakes. Many of them. So he smiled at this strange lanky young-old Doctor, who had just walked up to him in the middle of a party full of people from all around this sector to _talk_.

“I know,” he said. “I'm not angry.”

The Doctor stared at him for a moment, coking his head to the side and following a stunningly beautiful lady in a red dress and with amazing curly hair with his eyes as she walked along the dance floor. When she caught him staring she winked and the Doctor just kept gazing at her, before turning back to Jack with a sombre expression. “Why are you not angry, Jack?”

Jack chuckled. “I'm not angry. Doesn't mean I wasn't angry before. That was a long time ago. Before that thing with the Master... Remember? Long time ago? I never expected you to apologize.” Then he caught sight of the woman again and gestured into her direction. “Your newest travel companion?”

The Doctor turned to look at her, watching as she talked to some of the other guests. “No. Not a travel companion. Someone important. No travel companions around these days.”

It sounded like there was a much more interesting story there, but the Doctor was back to staring into his wine with a strangely blank expression.

“Are you travelling alone again? You know that never works out.”

The Doctor snorted and shrugged. Something sad passed over his face, but vanished again a moment later. “Want to come along?”

Jack looked around the room, asked himself what he was still doing here, why he hadn't gone and started a new life already anyway. It was time. “Why not?”

When this new Doctor looked up at his answer as if he he was still thinking this over, Jack got a glimpse of the writing on one of the menus suddenly proclaiming: “He did come back!” A startled chuckle was wrenched from his throat. The Doctor frowned and followed his line of sight, raised an eyebrow and turned back to Jack.

“Good old, Rose,” he said and added nothing more.

Jack shook his head and whispered. “Yeah, good old Rose. Still looking out for me, back from that one moment in time when all of this got started.” He smiled. Rose hadn't known what she was doing. The Bad Wolf had fixed him in time, because a human girl had wanted him to live. But in that very moment she'd seen all of time, had been everywhere at once. He shook his head again. “I thought she meant you'd come again to fix me. Back then. She meant now. Coming back to apologize after all these years.” He chuckled and shook his head.

The Doctor looked at him with a blank expression and then smiled at Jack. “Come on then!” he said. “I gather you've waited long enough!”

“You still know how to dance?” Jack asked jokingly.

“I know quite a bit about dancing, Jack,” the Doctor nodded, setting down his drink, and started towards the exit. “Just ask River,” he said and gestured toward the beautiful not-travel-companion.

When Jack met her eyes across the crowd of people between them, she smiled and winked at him.

He had to think of her when two days later - when both he and the Doctor were covered in fluorescent, yellow slime, another planet saved and another adventure behind them - the Doctor just leaned forward without warning to press a soft kiss against his lips.

* * *

The true irony of eternal life was that _nothing_ ever lasted. Things changed, the universe moved on and sometimes Jack needed to change with it. Sometimes he needed a challenge, something to do.

His newest challenge was waiting for him here on a little outback planet in the 53rd century. Here, with a group of rebels fighting for their freedom in the colonies of the Marvellian star system. It reminded him a little of his home world, a world he'd never once missed in all of his long life. The people around him remind him of a time when he'd had been responsible for a group of remarkable people he'd never forget.

The Doctor smiled at him sadly when he realized what was to come, but didn't say anything until he was ready to return to the Tardis and to the vortex, never one for standing still or remaining too long in one place.

This time Jack chose to stay behind. This time the Doctor didn't just leave him. They parted with a kiss and without ever truly saying good-bye.

This time both of them knew it wouldn't be forever.

They'd meet again.

* * *

By now he couldn't even remember how many years had passed. He just knew he wanted to see the Doctor again. His vortex manipulator had given out on him some 50 years ago and living a linear life had become tedious. He yearned for someone who could understand his crazy life, his impossible existence.

 _Bad Wolf_ , the signs around him read suddenly and he stopped in the middle of a street, right in front of a dark alley. He frowned.

Why now? Why here?

 _Wait here,_ it read and vanished.

He waited. Minutes passed and he was beginning to doubt his old, crazy mind, when the familiar sound reached his ears and then the air in front of him turned into the wonderful sight of a blue police box right there in the alley.

The door opened and Jack didn't need an invitation then.

After all he'd been waiting for the moment when he'd finally be found again.

They'd always find each other. And the _Bad Wolf_ would always look out for them. Immortality didn't seem that scary any more.


End file.
